between the religion of Mary and the religion of Christ; and he trembled for Bessie as well as for every individual he loved, thinking how their faith would now be tried in the fire. There was ranged against Protestant truth now all the power of falsehood in Mrs. Lorraine, and all the power of overwhelming wealth in the family at Eaglescairn; therefore his heart sunk at the prospect, but it would have sunk yet more deeply had he known, that though Bessie spoke and felt with boundless horror of Romanism, she had nevertheless imbibed a taste for the reading which leads to Rome, and acquired some of the thoughts and the propensities which tend most surely in that direction. The Popish faith is so suited to the natural inclinations of sinful human nature, that in one respect it resembles the small-pox; those once inoculated with it, though the beginning seem no larger than the prick of a needle, soon have it spread over the whole constitution of their minds; and Bessie, in the secret cogitations of her own private mind, felt dazzled and charmed with many of the images and pictures of supernatural excellence which Mrs. Lorraine had clandestinely stamped upon her young and often lonely spirit. The privilege of praying for her deceased mother, whom she still remembered with deep affection, was a sentimental indulgence very attractive to her imaginative feelings; and even in respect to confession she thought how interesting it would be, if she could have an hour's conversation every month with Mr. Clinton, had he been a Popish Priest, entirely about herself, and to hear what he thought of all the many fancies and feelings that often crowded through her busy mind to interest and perplex her. Bessie thought she could not be actually rude to Mrs. Lorraine, when that lady most kindly came to visit her, and brought her some needlework to do, for which she paid most liberally; and though her calls at the cottage became more and more frequent, always timed when Bessie was sure to be alone, still they were endured with more and more complacency, till they became at last her most indispensable enjoyment. She forgot to eat, drink or sleep, while a glow of pleasure lighted up her beautiful young countenance in listening to highly coloured pictures of saints who, with humbleminded pride, attained to such perfection on earth, that their faces became luminous during their devotions, and of glorious visions appearing to those who, from want of sleep and food, had become in fact delirious. Bessie was unconsciously on the outer circle of that superstitious whirlpool, from which a rescue is as rare and difficult as from Maelstrom itself. "Lo! the spell now works around thee, O'er thy heart and brain together Shall the word be pass'd-Now wither !”—Manfred. CHAPTER XV. "She was one of those kinds of nuns, an' please LADY EDITH might as well have attempted to take the moon out of the water as to remove Mrs. Lorraine from Clanmarina. Before many days, the intruder, who seemed now to have an unlimited command of money, established her opposition school at Clanmarina, upon the most attractive plan, with a tea-party on Saturday to all the pupils. She moreover opened an extremely fascinating little bazaar, in which she completely under-sold the small village shop-of-all-work, where hitherto the humble penny customers had been supplied with tea, sugar, brooms, tape, needles, tracts, snuff, biscuits, rat-traps, gingerbread elephants, tobaccopipes, and other groceries. The new schoolmistress adorned her windows most enticingly with gaudy stucco images of St. Joseph at ninepence each, rosaries of scarlet beads for eighteen-pence, and coloured pictures of monks and nuns in very devout attitudes, while exhibiting faces of most disastrous melancholy. These had a sort of terri fying attraction for the young, who constantly paused as they passed, flattened their noses against the window-pane, and after staring first at the barley-sugar medals, and then at the painted idols, lingered with awe-stricken, but delighted horror to gaze at a dismal nun, with an immense tear for ever on her cheek, or at a monk evidently starving and torturing himself to death. This was all so new to the children, and even to their parents, that all ages and sexes clustered eagerly round the little fascinating shop, with their large round eyes staring at these wonderful representations, and their noses almost breaking the glass while trying to read these authentic histories, and wishing to buy story-books that told tales as fearful and as truthful as a night-mare, every one more romantic than the Seven Champions of Christendom. Mrs. Lorraine, with smiling philanthropy, invited all the young people to enter her warehouse, and benevolently sold them bargains of her books and tracts for whatever price they could afford to give, adding sometimes a present of a print representing some terrifying auto-da-fé, or some incredible apparition. The villagers, over-awed and interested by the impenetrable mystery of Mrs. Lorraine's origin and projects, listened with constantly increasing and constantly baffled inquisitiveness, in a perfect frenzy of curiosity, to every particular of their children's visits at the residence of this mysterious neighbour, about whom there arose in the neighbourhood a perfect outcry of gossip. As Robert Carre jestingly said, "Never before, since the world was the world, did an incognita appear in our village, and I wish she may not turn out like the cat among the mice!" It soon became an ascertained fact among the villagers, that this living enigma, Mrs. Lorraine, never received a single letter, that she lived on a crust of the driest bread, and that, nevertheless, money was no object to her, as she lavished it on every Popish scheme, with a profusion hitherto undreamed of in Clanmarina; therefore hers must be a voluntary poverty. " "Popish money can do no one here any good;' said Robert Carre earnestly. "If Mrs. Lorraine, who looks as dismal as midnight in winter, means us well, why is she so secret? Why come like a vagabond dropped from the clouds, and belonging to nobody? She has the look of some one who has committed crimes; she has a stealthy, thievish, convict step, and a very cunning eye." In spite of all that Robert could say or hint, Mrs. Jesuit, as he called her, still kept her place, an object of suspicion and fear among those who thought her "no better than she should be, or probably worse;" but gaining rapidly in the confidence of others who found her liberality convenient, or her conversation, though startling, still |